Elliot Norquist
and J eremy
Tertium Non
Datur: Dialogues in Steel, the show’s title, is meant to express the give-and-take between informing artist and unformed material—here, between foundry sculptor and resistant steel— and by extension the conversation of viewer with the finished product. But “dialogue” in this exhibition of work by sculptors Elliot Norquist and Jeremy Thomas also infers a creative exchange between the two bodies of work. In that respect the title underscores a fundamental problem with the show, which has to do not with their collaboration but with the actual deployment of the works of both sculptors, one that unwittingly transforms a dual pointcounterpoint into a duel of disjunctive aesthetics. The work of Thomas comprises eight highly chromatic forged steel sculptures, six of which fall within the scale of his Morpho Didius Blue (20” x 26” x 19¼”), while the remaining two extend some five to eight feet in all three dimensions. Each welded form is an ensemble formed of discrete fluid surfaces defined by glossy coats of bright blue, yellow, or orange. As the titles suggest, the forged steel abstracts are highly allusive, resembling birds in flight (Southern Tail Birdwing) or organic pods (Soul Green), while the large pieces Bailer Yellow and Gleaner evoke the lacquer-green and yellow world of John Deere tractors.
Thomas: Dialogues
Being biomorphic, Thomas’s sculptures straddle the line between organic and abstract, but in the show they do not convey the inherent tension between the two modalities that is the strength of such abstracted form. Instead, in the gallery space they come across as tentative rather than assertive, and as such they fail to really engage the viewer. This is in large part a function of their placement. Thomas’s morphed pods and avian volumes continue the Modernist tradition of abstract forms whose suggestive shapes evoke a fictive space inhabited by nature and quickened by a veiled narrative. This poetic space is dispelled by several of the small pieces on the gallery floor that appear randomly placed like abandoned spinning tops or Lego toys. These pieces intrude into the viewer’s space rather than assert their physical presence in it. That disjunction dispels the poetic space around the pair of large pod sculptures, exposing the otherwise ambivalent surfaces of the squash blossom forms whose physical presence and scale in the gallery is made more transparent by the diverse surface coatings that suggest a volume assembled from two molds. In their spare geometry, Norquist’s painted steel squares, triangles, and concentric circles on the surrounding gallery walls seem to frown down upon the playful pods on the gallery floor. In each wall piece the elements are painted in complementary color contrasts:
in
Steel
Kansas Sunflower has a bright blue circle surrounded by a band of yellow ochre. Red Cherry Lifesaver’s deep red circle is edged in black, and the bright orange disk of Fire Season is edged in yellow ochre, while in another piece a small, intense red-painted steel disk pursues a larger fleeing black triangle. Each of Norquist’s geometric forms plays out like a theorem of Euclid, asserting a proposition that is demonstrated by its interaction of shape and color. If their conjunction with the organic shapes of Thomas’s luminous pods heightens the Minimalist look of Norquist’s work, that characterization is not supported by the sculptor’s focus on color, shape, and composition. That approach to the art object is a Modernist one rejected by artists like Donald Judd and Frank Stella, who defined what would come to be called Minimalism. And perhaps this disparity of Norquist’s style with the Minimalist aesthetic provides a clue to the show’s overall failure to realize the separate strengths of the collaboration. In Aristotle’s classic formulation of different categories of opposition, two propositions are contradictory if one is the denial or negation of the other. Unlike contraries (black vs. white), which allow a third, mediating proposition (brown), in the case of contradictories (alivedead) tertium non datur—i.e., a third (mediating) option is not possible. For all its debt to the late Modern, Abstract Expresssionist current,
Charlotte Jackson Fine Art 554 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe the succeeding Minimalist aesthetic had as its core tenet a flat contradiction or denial of the fundamental Modernist notion of the art object. Perhaps best articulated by Judd, the “specific objects” that would succeed Modernist paintings and sculptures could be, and were, as visually diverse and disparate as Judd’s own sequence of modular metal boxes, Carl Andre’s rows of bricks, Claes Oldenburg’s colossal vinyl Floorburger, and John Chamberlain’s welded crushed-auto sculptures. Thus for all their transitional ties to late Modernist work, Minimalism’s specific objects involved a denial of the allusive, of implied narrative, and of rational manipulation of color and shape—attributes of Modernist work—and an affirmation of the “primary object” instead, Judd’s physical, unmediated, object in literal space—“specific, aggressive, and powerful.” Neither Thomas’s biomorphic sculptures nor Norquist’s geometric wall compositions subscribe to the Minimalist aesthetic. Their placement in the gallery as if they did—as if they were specific objects in literal space—has the unintended effect of denying the Modernist, allusive space they normally inhabit and affirming a Minimalist identity as specific objects which they do not possess. At the core level of aesthetics, there is no dialogue here in the absence of a clear affirmation or denial. Tertium non datur. —Richard Tobin
Installation View